Category: Uncategorized

Hangtown Fry — Placerville, California

These eggs have been scrambled with oysters, bacon, and onions, resulting in a dish called Hangtown Fry. There are competing stories of its origin.

One story, promoted by Placerville, tells of a miner who discovered a rich vein of gold in the mid 1850s. Flush with his new wealth, he came into town and demanded a meal made of the most expensive ingredients he could imagine. At the time Placerville was called “Hangtown,” and so the dish became known as Hangtown Fry.

There is another story, though.

That one tells of a man condemned to hang. Desperate to delay his final event, he requested oysters, bacon, onions, and eggs for his last meal. He thought it would take a long time to come up with those ingredients, especially the oysters.

It’s too bad for the macho reputation of the dish and for the rambunctious, gold-mining image Placerville promotes, that one restaurant serving Hangtown Fry today is called … Buttercup Pantry.

Coloma, California

Gold!

On January 24, 1848, a man named James Marshall discovered gold in what is now the town of Coloma, California. At the time, he wasn’t looking for it.

Marshall was a business partner of John Sutter, who needed lumber to develop extensive land holdings in what is now California. The deal: Sutter would finance the construction of a sawmill, and Marshall would build it.

The original Sutter’s Mill didn’t last long. It was completely washed away by the South Fork of the American River, which flows just to the left of the photo above.

The mill you see here is a reconstruction, built to the original plans. Marshall placed his mill near the river because it relied on water power to drive its saw. Water was diverted from the river to run through the mill race (the ditch in the foreground). Water pressure turned the water wheel visible at the bottom of the building, which in turn operated a saw on the upper level.

Marshall had trouble getting water to flow freely enough to drive the saw, and so his workers kept digging at the mill race. One day, while inspecting that work, Marshall looked down at the water trickling past his feet and, using only his hand, scooped up some flakes of metal.

What he said on that occasion is known: “Boys, by God I believe I’ve found a gold mine!” The boys were skeptical.

They suspected the presence of iron pyrite, or fool’s gold, so they ran tests. The metal flakes were bent, bitten, hammered with a rock, and, finally, soaked in lye.

The verdict: Gold!

The result, according to the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where the mill is located, was “The largest voluntary mass migration of people in history.”

The park, eight miles north of Placerville and Route 50, also features a majestic statue of James Marshall pointing to the spot where he discovered the gold. In real life, he and Sutter likely felt much less than majestic about the whole thing. They both died in poverty.

Ladybugs

Each year millions of ladybugs are born in California’s Central Valley, between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the sea. They fly up and are carried by air currents into the Sierra foothills. There, they are trapped by ladybug hunters and brought back to the Central Valley for use in agriculture.

Sacramento, California

The capitol building in Sacramento, California, is one of four state capitols on Route 50. (The other three: Annapolis, Maryland; Jefferson City, Missouri; Carson City, Nevada. Not to mention Washington, D.C.)

Sacramento is named for the Sacramento River, which borders it on the west. The river, in turn, was named “Santisimo Sacramento” (most holy sacrament) by a Spanish cavalry officer.

To get to Sacramento, Route 50 comes down from Echo Summit in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is west of Lake Tahoe at an elevation of 7,382 feet.

Because Sacramento rests at thirteen feet above sea level, the climb to Echo Summit is the longest on Route 50. This is true even though the Rocky Mountains are higher than the Sierras, and Monarch Pass, where Route 50 crosses the continental divide, is at an altitude of 11,312 feet. However, the climb to reach that point begins at Canõn City, Colorado, elevation 5,331 feet. That makes it a climb of ‘only’ 5,981 feet, or about 1,400 feet less than the climb from Sacramento to Echo Pass.